PARTISAN REVIEW
59
with its single tree, at evening, by the possibility that he will come
to them or summon them to him, and their task, we might call it
their raison d'etre, is just to wait. The play was originally called
simply
Waiting,
and there is a significant clue in the final French
title: en
attendant, "while
waiting." The drama is about what
Vladimir and Estragon do while waiting for Godot, who does not
come, whose very nature is that he doesn't come. He is a sought–
for transcendency, that which is desired beyond our physical lives,
so that these may have meaning.
But the meaning, the validation the tramps seek for their lives
is never forthcoming; there is no transcendent being or realm from
which human justification proceeds, or rather -- and this is the
crucial difference between
Waiting for Godot
and so many modern
works of despair -- we cannot be sure whether there is or not.
In
the space this doubt creates Didi and Gogo exist, neither "saved"
nor "damned," unable to leave, which is to say unable not to
exist, held there by an unbearable tension which it is their task -–
or rather the play's task, the playas formal human invention -–
to make bearable. Godot is not a figure for God or for immortality
or, conversely, for the absence of these; he or it is a term within an
imagined structure of life as we would feel or experience it if we
were reduced, as Didi and Gogo are, to sheer, naked, noncon–
tingent being, without theories, rationalizations, or abstract con–
solations of any kind.
For as Jacques Guicharnaud has said the figure of the tramp
represents "man as such, as detached from society," and so from
the mental and behavioral constructions by which social organiza–
tion hides from us our real condition. Society is by nature op–
timistic, progressive (in the sense that it moves forward, develops
new forms, believes that it improves), and self-sufficient. Man
beyond (or beneath) society is pitched past such categories as
optimism and pessimism, is existentially static (except that he
moves physically toward death), and is radically insufficient.
Wait–
ing for Godot
is a drama of man in such a state.
It
thus resembles
in its themes and attitudes a number of plays of the modem past:
Peer Gynt,
with its motif of the destruction of the self through a
belief in its sufficiency;
The Three Sisters,
with its static extension
of lives that do not find culminations;
Baal,
with its protagonist
placed beyond society's laws and claims.
